There Is No “P” In Our PTSD

It has happened again. A young black boy was shot by a police officer who claims he was doing something he was not doing.

Dallas area teenager Jordan Edwards was not drunk. He was not high. He was not belligerent. He was not committing a crime. He was a teenager sitting in a car with his two brothers. Like many teens at the end of the school year, they went to a house party (with their parents’ permission). The party got loud and the neighbors complained. Jordan and his brothers decided they should leave before there was any real trouble. They were driving away from the party when the police officer got an ASSAULT rifle and shot into their car.

He blew this boy’s head off … for what?

While Jordan lay dying, his brothers who had just witnessed this trauma were arrested … for what? The officer lied about what happened, claiming the boys were illegally backing their car up on the road. When the police department saw the body camera they realized the officer lied. He has been fired for failure to comply with police procedure but not arrested. This kind of thing keeps happening to black people. This is why there is no P (Post) in our PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

Every black person I know can tell me of the moment they first experienced the trauma of being black in America. My father had horrific stories of growing up in South Carolina, the son of a sharecropper. People would mysteriously disappear and sometimes show up hanging from a tree out in the country reminiscent of Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit.” My trauma came at the age of 7 when I saw the photo of Emmett Till’s mutilated body in Jet Magazine. At only 14 years old, this baby was brutally attacked by grown men, hanged, strangled, and body tied to a cotton turbine, and submerged in a river.

For some people, witnessing the Rodney King beating awakened the trauma. More recently the series of shootings and exonerations for these shootings have reinforced the trauma. Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Gardner, Rekia Boyd, Alton Sterling, and many more remind us that the lives of Black people are not valued in this society.

We are not naïve. We know that the society despises us because we are a constant reminder of its lack of humanity. Unlike other groups, we did not choose to come to America. And the kidnapping, brutalizing, raping, and exploiting of black people are historical facts. Every time the society looks at us, it is reminded of its own lack of humanity. We know America hates us. We just need you to leave us alone. We need a space for healing.

We cannot say we are experiencing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We experience Traumatic Stress Disorder. Our lives and those of our children are so tenuous. We have to worry that people entrusted with protecting us are likely to prey upon us. We have to worry that we are never believed in situations when we testify against a white person who insults or assaults us.

Even in the spaces of “higher learning” our children are verbally, emotionally, and physically attacked. Just this past week, an African-American young woman became student government president at American University and awoke the next day to a series of nooses and bananas. This kind of intimidation reminds us that there is no ‘P’ in our ‘PTSD’. The American University incident is just one among scores that have occurred in the Trump era. These aggressions (they are not micro) have been there all along. They just seem more evident because we live in a time of increased surveillance.

We need to be aware that this trauma is not going away. This society is committed to its hatred of black people. It is determined to traumatize and terrorize us and the only thing we have to fight it is our humanity. We must remind ourselves that we will not let the society’s definitions of who we are govern us. They are not valid. We must remind our children that they are worthy and wonderful. We must continue to fight even when the fight seems futile. We must not be overcome by the fact that there is no P in our PTSD!

Gloria Ladson-Billings is the Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies for the University of Wisconsin.